So what distrobution is a good'en. I liked the look of openSuse but wanted to know about say differences between gnome and kde and also end user experience. What would be better to run a ruby stack on?

ubuntu is the easiest and most user-friendly distrib , with a huge community and a lot of tutorial that could really ease your life as if you have a probleme , all you'll have to do will be to look on the wiki and follow instuctions

otherwise for the look the distrib doesn't really matter as lot of distrib are avalaible with several graphic aspect ( i don't know how you call gnome or Kde ?